Heidegger said in 1928: “die Frage nach dem Sein [ist] keine beliebige und [wird] nicht von aussen dem Menschen zugetragen, sondern in ihm mehr oder minder wach ist, sofern er ueberhaupt als Mensch existiert…” The author is very critical of this assertion. If it is really the case, are the people who speak non Indo-European language still human beings or not? Is it possible the non-Indo-European language speaking people could have latent understanding of the meaning of being without the word being at all in their language? If the second one were a reality, could the assertion of Heidegger be correct that Sprache is “das von Sein ereignete aus ihm durchgefuegte Haus des Seins”?

View History as the Existing Situation from the Being of Thing. The question of “What is a thing?” is closely related to that of Being. Heidegger had dealt with the research of thing repeatedly since 1919. The following article will show that, regardless of his inspiring thinking about “ready-to-hand” of thing in Being and Time, his research was more extensively developed in his later years at the end of 1940s. By exploring the possibilities of viewing a thing, Heidegger continuously attempted to reveal the serious limitation of Platonic tradition in the western philosophy. This article will analyze in detail the crucial role of History of Being in Heidegger’s understanding of thing through an example of jug. Heidegger in his piece not only suggests a change of attitude to view a thing, but also “viewing a thing” as not simply a passive activity. It is rather a kind of “step backward” of thinking, which means how to let the representative, analytical and interpretative art of thinking return to its pre-reflective, pre-conceptual and intuitive state of existence.

Temporality, death and history: a reflection after Heidegger. This paper aims to evaluate how Heidegger deals with the problem of time in Being and Time. The fundamental issue in that magnum opus is to explain the question of the meaning of Being under the horizon of time. But what kind of philosophical resource could make Heidegger be capable to resolve the problem in the most effective way? The phenomenological interpretation of time takes the first priority in consideration. Although in Being and Time Heidegger has literally made a very little reference to Husserl, the influence of Husserl is too obvious to be denied. Heidegger, however, finds Husserl’s elucidation of time has ever dissolved the dimension of time into the immanence sphere of subjectivity. By making the position of the subject in an all too mighty status, the phenomenon of time has not been rendered faithfully in a phenomenological sense, the motto “zu die Sache selbst”. And, Heidegger would regard Husserl’s working on time has not fully observed this highest norm. Bearing the problem in mind when starting to compose Being and Time, Heidegger has to find a new way to avoid the same “mistake” as his master, and the overall contribution of his great work could in turn be assessed under the same evaluative principle. Has Heidegger successfully saved up “time” from the over dominance of the subject? Has he re-disclosed time as objectively as time itself (die Sache selbst)? This paper focus especially on how Heidegger’s thinking of the past and the future moments in Being and Time. Then, we can see that, when comparing with two other phenomenologists’ treatments on the same issue, Gadamer and Levinas, Heidegger resolutions on “past” and “future’ obviously show their weakness. And, the promise of removing the dominance of the subject is doomed to failure. Moreover, the underlining structure of organizing Being and Time has not fully escaped the way of metaphysical thinking. In his later period, which is so called the “turning”, Heidegger attempts to break down the metaphysical thinking about “foundationalism”, behind this thinking is the presupposition of dichotomy between founding and founded. Judging from this perspective, Being and Time has found no way out of the labyrinth.

The active subject in the historical situation: An interobservation between the philosophy of Marx and phenomenology. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Phenomenology and Marxism have been two major paradigms in human science based on their contribution to ontology about human being instead of methodology. The phenomenological analysis of the ability of sense-giving of human-being made man as a being-active in the world, while the historical materialism of Marx defined man as a passive-being within the particular historical situation. However, these two discourses may easily open to misconception. Phenomenology was once seen as under the banner of solipsism and the philosophy of Marx as an economical or material determinism. In fact, in Husserl’s Ideas II, Husserl had noticed the role and the function of the body in constitutive act and then the human being had been thought as a passive-being, a corporeal-being-in-the-world, in phenomenology. On the other hand, for Marx, his historical materialism had never negated man as a being-active in the historical process. But both of these two philosophical systems cannot successfully describe human being as being-active meanwhile as being-passive. Therefore, I suggest that it is propitious moment to clarify the unclear dimensions of these two philosophical discourses through the dialogue between them. In addition, I will attempt to propose some new statements on the relationship between the body, will and history.